The impact of guilt and type of compliance‐gaining message on compliance

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Abstract
Consistent with Cialdini's Negative State Relief Model it has been established repeatedly that targets of compliance‐gaining attempts comply with a request to help more frequently when those targets feel guilty than when they do not feel guilty. Expanding upon this result it was predicted that to the extent that a compliance‐gaining message serves as a cue to link compliance with the restoration of positive or neutral affect, the compliance rate would vary. Building upon this reasoning it was hypothesized that a positive self‐feeling compliance‐gaining message would be more effective in producing target compliance than would a direct request message when the target felt guilty, but that the opposite relationship would hold when the target was not feeling guilty. An experiment in which both guilt and message type were varied was designed to test this hypothesis. In the main, the data were consistent with these predictions.

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